Example of the new party line:

"I make no apologies," Rove said when an audience member asked how personally responsible he felt for the war. "It was the right thing to do. The world is better off with (Saddam Hussein) gone. We all thought he had weapons of mass destruction. The whole world did. He didn't. ...

"In the aftermath of the removal of the regime, al-Qaeda decided to make its stand in Iraq. And we have got to, in my opinion, fight `em and beat `em there; otherwise we are going to face them somewhere else."

footnote

BTW Mr Rove, "the whole world" didn't think Saddam and Co had WMD.  I didn't, for one.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

yup, the operation was a wonderful success, pity about the patient...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

The MSM hasn't challenged the white house in several decades - the only people that have been doing consistent criticism are the partisan media outlets. The only exceptions that come to mind are Clinton's universal health care coverage proposal in the early 90's (attacked for obvious reasons), the Monika Lewinski affair (which was a personal attack, not a policy attack) and some of the coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, which was such a stunning and total government failure that it caused a couple of journalists to briefly transform from professional robots into human beings (a shocking moment to be sure).

Anyway I think this is just another sign of Bush increasingly going for broke, which, come to think of it, is the road he's been on since his infamous "mission accomplished" speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003.

you are the media you consume.

Oh yes, it's al Al-Qaeda now. The more military minded bloggers have been shaking their heads in disbelief for at least a month or two over it.

Al-Qaeda is now code for THE ENEMY. I'm pretty sure that in Bushspeak we're all Al-Qaeda.

This week's public editor column in the NY Times is quite interesting, and relevant to this discussion.

AS domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda.

Bush mentioned the terrorist group 27 times in a recent speech on Iraq at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. In West Virginia on the Fourth of July, he declared, "We must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq." The Associated Press reported last month that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda.

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven't been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda's role in Iraq -- and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn't even exist until after the American invasion....

was an FBI construct to describe (and thus, to call into being) the old mujaheddin networks that were related to the bombing the US embassies in kenya and tanzania, it's not surprising that the bush administration is trying to expand the amorphous definition where politically expedient. there was never as much there there as the proper noun rhetorically implied.